The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache™ Tajo™ as a Top-Level Project
Advanced Open Source data warehousing system in Apache Hadoop in use by Gruter, Korea University, and SK Telecom, among others, for processing Web-scale data sets

FOREST HILL, Md., April 1, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Tajo has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"It's a pleasure to graduate from the Apache Incubator," said Hyunsik Choi, Vice President of Apache Tajo. "This milestone further reinforces our hard work in bringing a much-needed big data solution under the Apache banner."

Dubbed an "SQL-on-Hadoop" solution, Apache Tajo is a robust big data relational and distributed data warehouse system for Apache Hadoop. Tajo is designed for low-latency and scalable ad-hoc queries, online aggregation, and ETL (extract-transform-load process) on large-data sets stored on HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and other data sources. By supporting SQL standards and leveraging advanced database techniques, Tajo allows direct control of distributed execution and data flow across a variety of query evaluation strategies and optimization opportunities.

The Tajo project began in 2010 at Korea University's Database Lab, and entered the Apache Incubator in March 2013. Apache Tajo is in use at Gruter, Korea University, and SK Telecom, among others, for its ability to analyze massive data sets in real time.

"Apache Tajo has earned its place as a top-level project in the ASF. It's an excellent example of a community building around a core piece of technology. Not to mention, the technology itself is quite cool. Tajo has a large role to play in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem," said Jakob Homan, Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, and ASF Member.

"Tajo project is a really good example that how company and Open Source community can benefit from each other. Its real open community has assisted me to solve lots of practical problems, and I have opportunities to make Tajo more robust and have richer functionalities," said Keuntae Park, IT manager of SK Telecom and contributor to Apache Tajo. "I feel much affection for Tajo project and it's my great pleasure to participate in its growth, graduation, and becoming of top-level project."

"Tajo is one of the most promising projects for SQL-on-Hadoop. Many contributors have been improving Tajo by developing various interesting features. It's an honor for me to work with such a wonderful community," said Jihoon Son, Ph.D. candidate at Korea University and contributor to Apache Tajo.

"Apache Tajo has been a model community through the Incubator. They have demonstrated meritocracy on lists in the face of some pretty awesome and complex software for Big Data Analytics," said Chris Mattmann, Apache Tajo Incubator Mentor at the ASF, and Chief Architect, Instrument and Science Data Systems Section at NASA JPL. "We are currently evaluating the use of Tajo in projects for Radio Astronomy at JPL, as well as in the context of our Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) project for Big Data query processing and storage. I'm really excited to see where Tajo is headed along with the other Big Data stacks at the ASF including Spark and Mesos."

"The key to a successful Open Source community lies in its diversity and active participation," added Choi. "As Apache Tajo continues to grow, we welcome contributions with code, documentation, testing, submitting patches, and other valuable forms of feedback."

Availability and OversightAs with all Apache products, Apache Tajo software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Tajo, visit http://tajo.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

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